Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Do You Remember .... Part One

When Senators fans go crazy, effigies of hockey players get burned in the streets of the Valley.

Of course, this is a newspaper clipping from the 1999-2000 season when Alexei Yashin bolted to Switzerland even though he had a legitimate NHL contract with the Senators, in an attempt to renegotiate for better money than the $3.6 million he was making at the time (this was his third holdout since 1994!!). GM Marshall Johnston set a deadline of November 8, 1999 for Yashin to report back to the team. When he failed to show, Johnston suspended him for the balance of the season and the playoffs and claimed the Russian star owed the franchise a full-year going forward (which ended up happening after an NHL ruling).

Yashin's girlfriend Carol Alt went on Live With Regis and Kathie Lee in New York and said, among other things, "He skates well and scores well, on and off the ice, I suppose" (to big laughs from the audience) and "His mentality is completely different from any man that I've ever met." Then Alt bolted to Zurich to be with Yashin while he practiced with the Kloten Flyers of the Swiss league.

Shortly thereafter, the effigy was burned in the streets of Arnprior after some kind of twisted, politically incorrect radio contest, which all makes the anger over Dany Heatley years later seem like "a case of the Mondays" in comparison.

I knew I had this clipping somewhere and I've been looking for it for years.

So there you go. Another proud or not so proud moment in Senators history.